Carbon status constrains light acclimation in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus

Acclimation to one environmental factor may constrain acclimation to another. Synechococcus elongatus (sp. PCC7942), growing under continuous light in high inorganic carbon (Ci; approximately 4 mm) and low-Ci (approximately 0.02 mm) media, achieve similar photosynthetic and growth rates under continuous low or high light. During acclimation from low to high light, however, high-Ci cells exploit the light increase by accelerating their growth rate, while low-Ci cells maintain the prelight shift growth rate for many hours, despite increased photosynthesis under the higher light. Under increased light, high-Ci cells reorganize their photosynthetic apparatus by shrinking the PSII pool and increasing Rubisco pool size, thus decreasing the photosynthetic source-to-sink ratio. Low-Ci cells also decrease their reductant source-to-sink ratio to a similar level as the high-Ci cells, but do so only by increasing their Rubisco pool. Low-Ci cells thus invest more photosynthetic reductant into maintaining their larger photosystem pool and increasing their Rubisco pool at the expense of population growth than do high-Ci cells. In nature, light varies widely over minutes to hours and is ultimately limited by daylength. Photosynthetic acclimation in S. elongatus occurs in both high and low Ci, but low-Ci cells require more time to achieve acclimation. Cells that can tolerate low Ci do so at the expense of slower photosynthetic acclimation. Such differences in rates of acclimation relative to rates of change in environmental parameters are important for predicting community productivity under variable environments.